Inventing Reality or Manufacturing Consent: Nonfiction November 2024, Week 3

This week in Nonfiction November, we are pairing books together! Here’s the prompt from Liz:

This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title (or whatever you want to pair up). Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or (because I’m doing this myself) two books on two different areas have chimed and have a link. You can be as creative as you like! (Liz)

In the past, I’ve made an elaborate table pairing nonfiction books with documentaries—which is still totally worth checking out, by the way. But for years, I’ve wanted to pair up a popular nonfiction book with a less popular book on the same topic. (Spoiler: I usually think the less popular ones are better!) This year the timing finally—mostly—lined up for me to compare Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s famous Manufacturing Consent and Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality.

Manufacturing Consent

Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a staple in leftist circles. Published in 1988, Manufacturing Consent lays out what the authors refer to as a “propaganda model” for the mass media, demonstrating with in-depth examples that the US major media outlets—CBS News, Newsweek, The New York Times, Time, and others—”serve to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the state and private activity.”

The authors immediately address the difficulty in seeing “a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent.” They argue instead that news has to go through a set of five “news filters”:

1. the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms;
2. advertising as the primary income source of the mass media;
3. the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and “experts” funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power;
4. “flak” as a means of disciplining the media;
5. “anticommunism” as a national religion and control mechanism.

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, p. 2 (formatted here as a bulleted list for ease of reading)

Essentially, what exactly is fit to print is determined by capitalists who own the news, who buy ad space, or who journalists use as sources—but it’s often all three.

Inventing Reality

Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media by Michael Parenti, published in 1986, has a very similar premise. (Both books even cover a handful of the same news stories, which I’ll compare later.) The third paragraph of the foreword tells us point blank: “In this book I will try to demonstrate how the news media distort important aspects of social and political life and why.” I always love to see a straightforward “In this book I will,” and chapter one goes into some more detail:

The mass media in the United States are privately-owned, profit-making corporations—like so many other institutions in our capitalist society. To understand how the media function, we need to understand a few things about the capitalist system itself. Most of the land, labor, natural resources, and technology of this and other nations are controlled by a few giant corporations and banks for the purpose of making profits for their owners. This process of capital accumulation, the essence of the capitalist system, in turn, exerts a strong influence over our political and social institutions. The news media seldom talk about this (and we shall see why), but it is time we did.

Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality, p. 1

Already Parenti has made a connection that Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model fails to. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Why the feud?

For all its fame, Manufacturing Consent has been criticized for being too dense, too long, not socialist enough, and even a rip-off of Inventing Reality.

While Manufacturing Consent did come out two years later and covers some of the same material as Inventing Reality, I don’t think it was copied in any way. Inventing Reality actually cites both Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman several times, showing that they had been discussing the biases in media for a long time already. Their book also includes hundreds of pages of discussion of the wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which Parenti only mentions in passing.

I do have to agree, however, that Parenti’s book is easier to read and is the “socialist version of Manufacturing Consent.” Inventing Reality is 247 pages to Manufacturing Consent‘s 371 including the “new” 2002 introduction.

Making the connections

Saying that Inventing Reality is better because it’s “the socialist version” isn’t just socialists preferring our worldview. Herman and Chomsky discuss many of the same pro-U.S. and anticommunist media biases as Parenti, but Manufacturing Consent has left me wishing that its authors had created a holistic model that describes why our media is that way. Manufacturing Consent is much more what where Inventing Reality is more why—but it’s a topic that isn’t really even worth explaining if the reader doesn’t know why it is that way.

If you look back at the paragraphs I shared from the first pages of each book, you’ll see what I mean. Herman and Chomsky reference media ownership, income, business influence, and anti-communism, but they never explicitly tell us why those things would be connected.

Meanwhile, in Parenti’s paragraph—and it is chapter 1, paragraph 1—the entire focus is on the capitalist system and the media’s place within it. When Parenti speaks of the same rampant anti-communism in the same news stories as Herman and Chomsky, it clicks for us, the readers. The U.S. capitalist class benefits from an anti-communism bias in U.S. media because communism, no matter where in the world, harms their business interests. This is a connection that Parenti stresses repeatedly. All the reasoning that Herman and Chomsky usually provide is whether a country is a U.S. client state, an “enemy state,” or a “Marxist-Leninist state.” They give preference to these socialist countries, but we aren’t told why.

Third-world elections and the plot to kill the Pope

Indulge me as I get into some specifics. Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent both discuss in detail two media campaigns: the 1984 elections in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.

In both books, the aim of the analysis of the U.S. media coverage of the Third World (their term) elections was to show that the news portrayed the election in El Salvador as a sign of a legitimate “fledgling democracy” despite it being in a state of constant institutionalized terror, while they portrayed the Nicaraguan election as “farcical” and illegitimate, even though Nicaragua was a relatively freer state with an objectively more democratic election. The actual reason for the opposite treatments? El Salvador was a U.S. client state and ally, and Nicaragua was a “Marxist-Leninist” government “that the Reagan administration was striving to destabilize and overthrow.”

A one to one comparison

The story of the papal assassination attempt is undeniably labyrinthine, so it was interesting to read how the different authors broke it down.

On May 13, 1981, Mahmet Agca shot and wounded Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square. Placed at the scene of the crime with Agca, was Omar Ay, a lifelong friend and member of [Turkey’s anticommunist terror group, the Grey Wolves, an affiliate of the fascist Nationalist Action Party (NAP), notorious for its massacres and assaults on labor, student, and community groups]. The gun used by Agca, according to Italian Police, was supplied by Omar Bagci, another Grey Wolf. Agca’s false passport was signed by the Turkish police official who also was with the Grey Wolves.

Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality, p. 161. Bracketed section taken from previous paragraph to provide context on the Grey Wolves.

The case began when Mehmet Ali Agca shot and seriously injured Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981. Agca was a Turkish rightist and assassin long associated with the Gray Wolves, an affiliate of the extreme right-wing Nationalist Action Party. Initial Western news reports pointed out that Agca was a wanted criminal who had escaped from a Turkish prison in 1979, and that his durable political affiliations had been with the Fascist right. His motives in shooting the pope were unclear. Agca’s friends were violently anti-Communist, so that, at first, pinning the crime on the East seemed unpromising.

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, p. 144

The propaganda spin

From the very beginning, we learn of Agca’s clear association with the fascist Turkish group the Gray Wolves. The Western media’s take, however, is that Agca was working with the Bulgarians, which meant he was working with the KGB. The idea that the Communists were really behind the papal assassination attempt was frankly a convoluted conspiracy theory—except it was perpetrated by The New York Times and Reader’s Digest, not 4chan.

Possibly the biggest difference in the ways that Herman and Chomsky and Parenti tell these stories is the time spent on them. Parenti spends four pages explaining how “when a client state holds an election, U.S. officials and the American press see democracy blooming, but these same opinion makers dismiss elections in revolutionary countries as a ‘sham.'” Herman and Chomsky spend 55 pages to tell us the same thing, writing, “A propaganda model would anticipate mass-media support of the state perspective and agenda. That is, the favored elections will be found deficient, farcical, and failing to legitimize—again, irrespective of the facts.” Notably, Manufacturing Consent includes in its analysis the 1984 election in Guatemala, which was a U.S. client state similar to El Salvador.

Likewise, the section titled “The Case of the Bulgarian Pope Killers” spans six pages of Parenti’s book. Herman and Chomsky’s chapter titled “The KGB-Bulgarian Plot to Kill the Pope: Free-Market Disinformation as ‘News'” is 24 pages long. Manufacturing Consent has a formulaic writing style in which the authors retroactively predict how any given story would be reported under the propaganda model that they outline for 35 pages in chapter 1. Unsurprisingly, the propaganda model is always correct.

Brass tacks

I emphasize the page counts of Manufacturing Consent because each section goes on forever. It may have felt this way for me because I read Inventing Reality first. Parenti covers everything succinctly but thoroughly. He goes into enough detail, but he doesn’t linger on any topic too long. Despite being much shorter, I would argue that Inventing Reality covers significantly more ground than Manufacturing Consent. In the time that Herman and Chomsky spend picking apart each media campaign with models, tables, and predictions, Parenti discusses U.S. use of chemical warfare, the Red Scare, self-censorship, regular censorship, pro-business bias, anti-union bias, capitalism, class struggle, anti-communist hysteria, Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States, and more.

For these reasons, I have to say that I prefer Inventing Reality to Manufacturing Consent. As others have noticed, Parenti is more readable, which itself would be a reason to pick his book over the other. Speaking from personal experience, even the most groundbreaking book can be a chore to get through if it’s too technical. I found that Inventing Reality proved that Manufacturing Consent simply didn’t need the analytical tone to get the message across.

Get yourself a copy!

I don’t agree with other assessments that Manufacturing Consent is simply not worth reading. While I think it is inferior to Inventing Reality, it has its positives: namely, that it is more widely accessible. It’s still in print, and I’ve seen it in bookstores a few times. Unfortunately, Inventing Reality is out of print, and physical copies can be expensive. Luckily, it seems to be commonly available in libraries, and if you don’t mind unconventional reading methods, the full book is on Internet Archive and YouTube!

Have you read either or both of these books, or other books by their authors? What did you think? Don’t forget to check out the other Nonfiction November posts for this week’s prompt here!